I originally planned to first tell you about Most Happy in Concert and then fill you in on the original. But I have changed my mind about that, too, and now think it’s better to set the stage with description and evaluation of the source material before considering how it’s been used in the present adaptation. It happens that I have written about The Most Happy Fella on several previous occasions, and have on hand the most thorough of those articles, the rights to which I have luckily retained, as I did those of my first From My Archive post (9/20/19). So here is Happy Fella Yields Up Its Operatic Heart (editor’s title, not mine), exactly as it appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, Sept. 1, 1991, except for a few newspaperly paragraph spacings, punctuation choices, and subheads (quotes and unquotes at beginning and end only):

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“Not long after our century had come of age, the American musical set out on its own. Forsaking the hearth and home of Anglo-Austrian operetta, it hung a hard right off Tin Pan Alley and headed uptown along the Great White Way. Like many a youthful prodigal, it exulted in its brashness and gloried in its ignorant, bounding energy. Yet, in time, it came to that familiar yearning. It longed for respect. It wished to be accepted in educated company, to be remembered beyond the pleasure of a moment. And so began a struggle to grow up that, over some 20 or 25 years, saw many a defiant binge and lots of exhausted backsliding, but also generated a group of works that strove to clothe plots and characters of greater maturity in an ever richer musical texture. Strove, in short, to be more like the operas of the classical repertory.

This growth toward American popular opera produced startling single specimens—Show Boat, Porgy and Bess early on—but yielded its most promising harvests in the 1940s and ’50s, in the work of Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein, and Frank Loesser, along with some of Richard Rodgers’ more ambitiously textured pieces. (Carousel is the one most often cited, and justly so.) Among these works, three have shown a particular durability of audience appeal and a growing (if sometimes grudging) critical reputation. They are Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Weill’s Street Scene, and Loesser’s Most Happy Fella. This season, Fella will become the last of the three to be inducted into our little Lincoln Center pantheon (New York City Opera premiere on Wednesday), but will receive its third Broadway production, as well.

Despite Loesser’s own insistence that Fella is merely “a musical with a lotta music,” it has much to gain by transference to the opera house. More than any of the musicals so far attempted at the State Theater, it has scoring (with orchestrations by the redoubtable Dan Walker) that can hold up to the auditorium’s cubic footage without betraying a miserable thinness of tone. The fuller string section, the rounder brass sound, the deeper and lovelier choral timbre we should expect from operatic forces can work a true transformation in Loesser’s score, as this writer discovered some years back through a fine production by the Cincinnati Opera. Fella is opera-friendly in other obvious ways, too—in its vocal distribution and the winning though unsubtle use Loesser makes of his Italian-American setting to mimic 19th-century Italian forms and conventions. But there is a more important sense in which Fella can be termed operatic. In this score, Loesser strikes through to the emotional lives of his characters in that complete, direct, dramatically grounded fashion that typifies all music theater that is more than entertaining. He also sets up—and then to a surprising degree resolves—a tension between “serious” musicodramatic devices and others derived from musical comedy or even vaudeville. This tension has been responsible for much equivocation about Fella. Classicists wilt and cringe at the Broadway brassiness, while theater types fidget at music that forces them to keep listening, and even drops hints of the disturbing or the ecstatic. Loesser can be heard battling his demon and rassling with his angel, and that is much of the fascination of the piece.